On Friday, we started slopes. I remember doing a little bit of this in grade 8 and 9 but all I remember were slopes being positive (or only the positive ones) so I assumed that all slopes were positive. This week, I learned that slopes can be negative.
The concept of negative slopes didn’t wrap around my head easily and I was quite confused about how they could be negative. For me to understand how a slope could be negative, I first figured out that the ones go towards the 2nd quadrant were negative. They usually look like \.
I always count the run first so the run of the two points I chose in the picture below is 3. Then I count the rise and the rise of this is also 3. Since the formula for slope is rise/run it will be written as 3/3 and it will be simplified to 1.
However, you can see that the number for the run seems odd. That’s because it is, how I like to say it, “going to the dark side” because it is going towards the negatives. Since I always count the rise upwards, it will always be positive for me but the run can go left or right. If it goes towards the left, or “to the dark side,” the slope will be negative. So the slope of this graph is not 1 but it is -1.
